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a lot of it is terrain as well. Look into slave uprisings/escapes. Places like Jamaica had mountains covered in jungle that had escaped slave communities, as did swamps of the south. But if you got inland in the south there wasn't really a way to deal with a local militia on horseback in an area that's open farm land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Maroons
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Dec 2, 2022 21:43
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“The West is still battling an ideology with technology,” he concludes with remarkable prescience, “and the successful end of that Revolutionary War is neither near nor is its outcome certain.” In a final chapter, Fall stresses the importance of what he calls “revolutionary war.” Defining it as the “application of irregular warfare methods to the propagation of an ideology or political system,” he carefully distinguishes revolutionary war from guerrilla or partisan war. Because of its political dimension, Fall insists, revolutionary war cannot be dealt with by military means alone. He criticizes the Americans for following the French in trying to use technology to compensate for “the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy” of the regimes they tried to prop up. Quoting approvingly a slogan posted on barracks walls in the First Indochina War—“Remember—the enemy is not fighting this war as per French Army regulations”—he warns that revolutionary war will continue to pose a challenge and that dealing with it cannot be left to “happy improvisation.” The West must understand it and learn how to fight it. Have Fall’s arguments stood the test of time? Were they validated or discredited by the Second Indochina War? The debate on these issues remains as heated today as in Fall’s time. Some analysts of the war stress that the United States, by accident or design, had thwarted the enemy’s revolutionary war strategy by 1968, particularly as a result of the disastrous Communist Tet Offensive. Ultimately, they contend, the United States and South Vietnam were defeated by conventional North Vietnamese armies that were supplied by the Soviet Union with conventional weapons and overwhelmed their South Vietnamese counterparts in the most conventional of operations.1 Nevertheless, many scholars still subscribe to arguments much like Fall’s. In words reminiscent of Street Without Joy, John Gates contends that “revisionist” interpretations advanced in recent years neatly fit the conventional thinking that has typified the U.S. military throughout the twentieth century. They err, as those Fall criticized, by equating revolutionary war with guerrilla war. In fact, Gates contends, in the period after Tet, the enemy continued to carefully integrate and skillfully employ all aspects of warfare. It used protracted warfare to undermine the position of the United States. It used guerrillas in coordination with conventional operations for intelligence and logistics, in combat, and for political agitation to undermine the South Vietnamese government. Thus, he concludes, “the 1975 attack was the coup de grace of a successful peoples’ war rather than the coup de main depicted in many recent American accounts.” Like Fall, Gates notes that the United States has learned nothing from its failure in Vietnam because it has refused to recognize the true nature of the war that was fought there Fall, Bernard B.. Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Stackpole Military History Series) . Stackpole Books. Kindle Edition.
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Apr 23, 2023 21:36
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For winning politically, I would argue that FDR won in the US. minimum wage, social security, etc meant that a revolution wasn't needed the same way as it was in russia, where the alternative to communism was an imperialist monarchy. We were never willing to push for these types of social programs externally though with any sort of sincerity. The funniest example of this is us trying to build schools in Afghanistan. Instead of building a civil system, we built hollow buildings with the wishful thinking they would magically be staffed.
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Apr 23, 2023 21:53
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